America is not Germany. And if Ohio is any indicator of national rigidity when it comes to laws and preparedness, it never could be. Reading through the regulations, I discovered that all an Ohioan needs in order to set to the field, gun in hand and pocket full of shells, is a short course in safety—taken either as a home study or a two-day seminar—and $19 for a general license. I know people who’ve spent more time training to operate a dolly in a warehouse. I made some notes about possible dates to take hunter’s safety and downloaded an electronic version of the course manual to Rebecca’s iPad for late-night study. I also browsed through the sections of the site that detailed the kinds of animals available in the state for hunting. These fit into a few neat categories: small game and upland birds, which included pheasant, quail, grouse, rabbits, squirrels, woodchuck, and all manner of other wee beasts winged and not; deer; waterfowl like ducks and geese; turkey; and other animals like red fox, feral hogs, and the occasional black bear that makes the news every time one is spotted on the other end of the southern part of the state.
Deer seemed like a natural choice. For the few hunters I do know outside of the family, this is their most likely target. The season is relatively long, broken up by types of weapons—bow, black powder, shotgun, handgun, and rifle—and having eaten my fair share of venison over the years from Dad’s hunting trips to Wisconsin, I knew I liked the taste. But I didn’t consider it as an option for long. For one, deer hunting is a solitary activity. You may go out with other people, but you are all relegated to your own tree stand or spot in the woods. You sit for long stretches, as I had with Uncle Mark a couple decades before, in the cold, not moving and just waiting. I don’t have the attention span to do that. I need a little more action. I also didn’t like the idea of camouflage. Bow hunters wear camo head to toe, going so far as to spray themselves with either simulated or real doe urine in order to draw males in close. Camo is for the military and little boys pretending to be in the military, I reasoned. And while sartorial considerations should not have been high on the list of priorities, they were there somewhere. If I was going to invest in clothing and gear, I wanted it to suit my particular idiom, my style, my sense of cool. That was one of the reasons why I gravitated toward fly-fishing. Men in waders casting a line from a bamboo rod and standing up to their asses in ice water just looked a whole lot cooler than some dude sitting on the shore with a coffee can full of worms and, one imagines, a cooler full of cheap beer.
Camo may also have put a dent in the idea of turkey hunting. But there were a few other factors that eliminated it as an option. One, who wants to shoot a Butterball? Don’t get me wrong, turkey is without a doubt my favorite meat at the local Subway, but the idea of nestling in close to the ground and calling one close was not appealing. Uncle Mark once told me about going turkey hunting and calling in a gobbler only to hear a shot ring out from the other side of the clearing as another hunter, unable to see him for his camo outfit, nearly blew his head off. I didn’t want that to happen. And knowing my luck, it would be exactly what came to pass. And, two, the turkey season in Ohio is in the spring, making it nearly impossible since it was already March, leaving little time for me to get myself in gear and get out into the field for that year’s hunt.
Duck and goose hunting had some appeal. Sure, there was camo involved, but remember that scene in Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees where he goes hunting with the Italian noblemen? It seemed like, pardon the pun, such a blast. Plus, I love duck. It’s one of my favorite things to eat, and having played golf fairly regularly as a teenager and into my twenties, I have a real disdain for geese. I held that option open for a while, but eventually closed it when I realized learning duck hunting would be something I would do on my own. I don’t know any duck hunters. My dad had never really hunted them that I knew of and I wanted this to be something I could share with him.
Bear? Not reliable enough. Dad got one in Canada. So did Uncle Mark. But the idea of trying to find a black bear in Ohio seemed an awful lot like trying to find Bigfoot. Except instead of shooting some grainy footage of the beast with a Super 8 camera, I would have to shoot and, presumably, eat it. Red fox felt too much like shooting a dog. And pigs? Well, the ODNR encouraged any hunter who came across them to shoot feral hogs, so it felt less like sportsmanship than blood sport. I decided to pass.
This left small game and upland birds. After several hours of careful consideration, I decided on pheasant. I remembered going hunting with my dad and uncle and cousin that one time for pheasant, so it fit the family requirement and, since we had done it in a group, it was more social than deer hunting. I knew Uncle Mark and his sons, Will and Tommy, hunted pheasant regularly. Plus, the more I read, the more I realized it was the perfect bird for me. And I remembered the pictures from the L.L.Bean catalogs of upland hunting scenes—men in orange vests and hats, khaki pants, and cool-looking boots walking through fields of tall grass, their English springer spaniels on the scent of birds. I had had a springer named “Quigley.” I loved that dog. The pictures were so inviting. They were the hunting equivalent of men in waders fishing for trout. And it’s not like you can get pheasant at the local grocery store. It was perfect.
Pheasants Forever, a group devoted to the hunting and preservation of the bird, describes the ringneck pheasant as “America’s Favorite Game Bird.” It’s a bit ironic given that, like nearly all the toys in our house, the pheasant is an import from China. Unlike many game animals, we can trace its introduction to the United States to a shipping manifesto. According to the august UltimatePheasantHunting.com, which seems devoted to all the pheasant news that’s fit to print:
The Ringed-necked Pheasant was imported to America from Asia, and no other game species introduced to this continent has been as successful at flourishing as the pheasant. One of more than 40 species originating in Asia and Asia Minor, these birds from the genus Phasianus are perhaps better known than any of the other 15 groups of pheasants in the world. All are related to the partridges, quails, grouse and guinea-fowls which make up the order Galliformes or chicken-like birds.
Archaeological evidence suggests that large pheasants lived in southern France in the Miocene period, some 13 million years ago. The Greeks knew the bird in the 10th Century B.C. and we have adopted their name for the species, Phasianus ornis (phasian bird), derived from the Phasis River (now Rion) near the Caucasus Mountains. The Chinese knew the pheasant some 3,000 years ago, but the Romans are considered responsible for the spread of pheasants in western Europe. When Julius Caesar invaded England in the first century B.C., the pheasant followed.
It wasn’t until 1733 that the pheasant appeared in North America, when several pairs of the black-necked strain were introduced in New York. Other pheasant varieties were released in New Hampshire and New Jersey later in the 18th century. Not until 1881, when Judge O.N. Denny released some 100 pairs of Chinese ring-necks in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, did the pheasant really gain a foothold in the United States. Since then, pheasants have been propagated and released by government agencies, clubs, and individuals, and for all practical purposes are established everywhere on the continent that suitable habitat exists.
Once I had established what I would be hunting, I quickly found myself consumed in the study of the pheasant. I ordered every book I could find on the subject, ranging from a collection of essays recalling individual hunts and lifetime experiences in pursuit of the ringneck to books on butchering and cooking, even husbandry of American pheasant. I hadn’t been so devoted to reading about a single topic since college, and my obsession drove me on. Late at night, with my wife and children asleep, I would spend a half hour or forty minutes reviewing the course material for hunter’s safety, then an hour or more reading about pheasants—how they prefer to live near brushy fence lines or scrubby woods that provide cover from predator species; how you’re more likely to find them in low-lying areas and how they tend to run when threatened as opposed to fly;
how, when cooking them, you need to be sure to add plenty of fat since the meat tends to be very, very lean. I studied techniques for hunting and watched video after gruesome video of the proper means of removing entrails from the bird while in the field.
This was the part that scared me the most. I loved the idea of being out in a field with a dog or other people and shooting the bird. That seemed so sporting, so regal. And I liked the idea that I could prepare one to be served. But it was the required action in between that made me nervous. I watched a series of videos in which American hunters of questionable dental stability displayed their preferred means of field dressing a bird, which consisted of standing on the bird’s wings, grabbing its feet, and pulling until the head, spine, organs, and other nontasty bits were pulled off like an old sock. The men demonstrating would cackle, then pull out a knife that looked like it had been purchased at a truck stop, and cut off the wings, leaving just the pinkish breast of the bird. I’ll hand it to these men, it was efficient. The whole process took less than a minute, but turning an animal inside out didn’t exactly inspire hunger or desire.
There was another method I found equally repugnant, involving a device called the Bird Hitch. Essentially, it’s a hook that fits onto the trailer hitch of your hunting truck. You jam the hook through the bird’s neck, grab it by the wings and pull. It’s dismembered in seconds, leaving the hunter with nothing but breast meat and wings. I threw up a little when I first saw it. Not a full upchuck, but one of those ones that rise up into your esophagus like Scooby-Doo peeking into a dark attic. Yet, I couldn’t stop watching because the video was not just one guy in a field, but several in several different settings using the Bird Hitch on several species. Pheasant, geese, ducks. All came apart with equal and apparent ease. It was an infomercial for drawing and quartering, an obvious attempt to drum up sales of the device, which made me wonder—who came up with this thing?
I imagined a group of semidrunk hunters sipping on Old Milwaukee and tediously going about cleaning the day’s haul around a campfire with knives.
“Boy,” says one, “field dressing birds is just such a pain.”
“I know,” says another. “I spend all day in the duck blind shooting only to come back to camp and have to spend hours dismantling these geese.”
“If only there was another way,” the first says.
Then, as if from the clouds, a baritone announcer chimes in: “Now there is an easier way!”
“There is?” the two befuddled hunters say in unison.
“That’s right! Never take the time to properly care for your prey again, thanks to the Bird Hitch!”
“The Bird Hitch? What is it?”
“It’s only the greatest thing to happen to evisceration since the Spanish Inquisition. The Bird Hitch makes low-grade mutilation easy and convenient, and it looks good on your truck too.”
“Wow!” they say in unison. “Thanks, Bird Hitch!”
I found other videos, mostly done by British sportsmen and chefs. These were decidedly more sedate and somehow more humane. I realize the incongruity of saying that I wanted to treat the birds I would theoretically shoot with a bit of dignity. After all, I would have just forced little bits of lead into them at fourteen hundred feet per second, but it somehow mattered. I wanted to be a hunter, not a killer, and grabbing a bird by its legs and yanking it apart head-through-asshole felt more like something a killer would do than what a gentleman hunter would do.
Soon, it was time to announce my plans, to tell somebody, anybody, what I had been doing on all those late nights. I needed to make my intentions known so that they would become a reality, or else I might content myself with surreptitiously watching videos late at night or reading in spare moments at the office. Sneaking off for private moments of hunting research was beginning to feel illicit, sneaky, like a preteen boy sneaking off for a few moments of vigorous self-exploration. I needed to tell somebody so that it didn’t feel quite so dirty.
At a dinner party for our wives’ moms’ group, I pulled John aside and told him my plan.
“I’m going to learn to hunt,” I told him.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “What are you going to hunt?”
“Pheasant.”
“That’s cool,” he said. “You got a gun? A license? Anything?”
“Got a gun, but nothing else.”
I told him what I knew about the license process and gave him a rough outline of what I wanted to do. I’d make my way out to Iowa in the fall with my dad, telling him I wanted to go hunting. I’d tell him I wanted him to take me pheasant hunting with Uncle Mark and some cousins. They wouldn’t expect much, given that I had never been before. But I’d spend the next six months preparing, learning everything I possibly could about hunting so that when I showed up, I would already be as close to an expert as possible.
“They’ll be surprised,” I told him, “because they won’t need to teach me a thing.”
“Sounds pretty cool,” he said. “What’s Rebecca say about it?”
“I haven’t told her yet.”
“Well, good luck with that one. You gonna write a book?”
“To be honest,” I said, “I hadn’t thought about it.”
He went off to get a couple more beers and I felt more excited than I ever had about the prospect of hunting. It felt like I had passed some sort of initial test. And I couldn’t wait to see the look on my dad’s and Uncle Mark’s faces when I showed up and kicked some pheasant ass.
I told Rebecca a couple of days later about my plan to become a hunter and, to my great surprise, she was fine with it.
“Knock yourself out,” she said. “Just don’t shoot your eye out.”
That may be one of the things I love most about my wife, her ability to be completely unironic. And, to be honest, I had expected a good deal more resistance to the whole thing. I realized later that I may have needed more resistance. Instead, her approval meant the only obstacles I had to becoming a hunter were the ones I would create in my own head. There were plenty of those, not the least of which was the simple question of why I would want to do such a thing.
I think in the very early stages, it’s because I was grasping for something. I was looking for something that would make me feel more like a man. But a month or two after my late-night revelation, I realized learning how to hunt would do little to improve my feelings of masculinity. Becoming a hunter wouldn’t undo the uncertainties I felt about my career choice; it wouldn’t fill my bank account and suddenly put us in a position to buy a house and settle into the life that had for so long surrounded us but that we had not been able to live. I had been desperate in thinking that it would.
So what was it then? Why was I even more determined than ever before to do such a thing? It was because I felt like an outsider, a pretender, a faux adventurer content to live through other people’s exploits. When I was in a room or at a party and someone would tell a hunting story, I would tell one of my dad’s or recite something I had read in Hemingway. But I didn’t know what it was like to walk off into the woods in pursuit of dinner. I didn’t really understand what my dad and uncles and cousins got from being out there. You tell your grandpa’s war stories when you’re in high school and they somehow feel like your own. But, at some point, it’s time to stop telling other people’s stories and simply enlist. I have told a few of my dad’s army stories dozens of times. I’ve told other people about the day he shot a bear in Canada. I’ve done it at parties. I’ve done it in meetings. And I’ve been crushed by the shadow of legacy, of having to tell my father’s stories because I had none of my own. I’m too old to join the army, too entrenched in my life that I was beginning to realize was only half lived. I realized it was no longer good enough to have his stories, because I could not have a perspective built on his experiences. I needed a perspective of my own, to live my own stories, to tell my own stories.
There was
also the curiosity. I wanted to know what it felt like to be out there, in the woods or on the field with purpose. I wanted to understand why highly unromantic people like my dad and family seemed so romantically drawn to the pursuit. I wanted to know what it was like to carry a gun, to listen to the sounds of the woods, to taste protein I had procured. I was well beyond the notion that learning to hunt would somehow make me feel more like a man. I was beyond the Hemingway code. Instead, I was driven by curiosity and a desire to once and for all feel what it meant to have stories of my own.
I had so few, particularly ones that were so grown-up, so adult. There were stories from my beat on the paper in Virginia, from college, and from life with Rebecca. There was our engagement and marriage, but those seemed like the last vestiges of youth, not the full-blown tales of adulthood. We had some. The birth of our kids, for example, or the child we lost to miscarriage, surviving soul-crushing debt and coming out better for it, but these aren’t the stories you tell around a bonfire. These are stories you tell yourself when you’re alone and in rush-hour traffic, the ones you tell no one.
I remained devoted to the idea that I could learn to hunt not because people were expecting me to do it, not because I had told a hundred people and they were watching me closely, but because they weren’t. Because it was unexpected. Because I wanted to do something disruptive and to understand better what hunting was about. And hunting was, at that time, the most disruptive thing I could do.
And Now We Shall Do Manly Things Page 5